Irena Haiduk

Seductive Exacting Realism by Marcel Proust 12

( 2016 )

Thomas Love Working (Capital), photo by David Bornscheuer, 2016.

Published by the Renaissance Society and Sternberg Press on the occasion of Irena Haiduk's Seductive Exacting Realism, this volume is an imposter featuring contributions by Ivo Andrić, Hannah
Feldman, Irena Haiduk, Monika Szewczyk, Marina Vishmidt, and Solveig
Øvstebø.A 13-volume set of Marcel Proust’s collected works
was published in Yugoslavia in 1967. This edition, in the Latin
alphabet, was highly valued by Yugoslav intelligentsia for its elegant
translation from French by the poet Tin Ujević. During the Bosnian civil
war, these Proust sets fetched up to the equivalent of a full year’s
salary in the Belgrade black markets. They were frequently looted
together with other valuables from Bosnian homes. The set exhibited at the Renaissance Society was seized by local police
from Belgrade Kalenić Market in 1995. It was acquired at a public
auction in 2014. It is missing volume number 12.

Spells

( 2015 )

Spells, designed by HelloMe: Till Wiedeck, Polina Joffe.

SPELLS, a monograph of writing and scores, edited by Karsten Lund
with an introduction by Matthew Jesse Jackson. Designed by HelloMe:
Till Wiedeck and Polina Joffe. Published by Sternberg Press.

SEDUCTIVE EXACTING REALISM

( 2015 )

Siren Bay, Renaissance Society. Photo by Tom Van Eynde.

A sound program based on an interview conducted by Irena Haiduk with Srdja Popovic, co-founder of the organizations Otpor! and CANVAS (Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies), at Harvard University on January 14, 2015.

SER consists of a waiting room and a blind room. The sound program lasts 30 minutes.

Nine Hour Delay

( 2012 -58 )

The Borosana shoe was first developed over a nine-year period (1960-69) at Borovo Rubber Industry Headquarters in Vukovar, Yugoslavia. After being designed and tested by the Borovo female workforce and an orthopedic surgeon, the shoe was mandatory for Yugoslav women working in the public sector. Borosana was launched in 1969, in white and navy colors, featuring an ergonomic platform, calculated as ideal for nine hours of standing without hurting the wearer’s spine. In the declining years of Yugoslav communism the model was withdrawn from mass production. Fabrication was abandoned when Vukovar became a war zone in 1991.

Each time this project is exhibited Borosana becomes the official work shoe of the host institution advancing the constructivist maxim of great utilitarian design in service of the working woman. The shoe extends the architecture of labor and provides the wearers with a distinction between labor time and leisure time. Borovo remains the last public Yugoslav infrastructure. The inability to legally split and privatize the company’s public assets prevents Yugoslavia from fully formally splitting to this day. With every new step Yugoslavia persists (insists).

Decapitation Index

( 2009 -11 )

Andre's head (detail).

This index is a Swiss Weltformat-size archive of narratives telling the deaths of the great white men of Minimalism and Conceptual art, in the guise of ongoing Serbian narco-mafia assassinations and retaliations.

The texts initially made as a TV news program create a tabloid killing spree/gang war, unfolding before and shortly after the artists’ arrival in Switzerland for the opening of the first major international survey of Conceptual art, “Live In Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form,” curated by Harald Szeemann for Kunsthalle Bern in 1969.

Sailors sing suicide songs

( 2008 )

Gesture Guild Bureaucratics.

A shipwreck anthem dedicated to the SS Patria II, which carried the International Congress of Modern Architecture from Marseille to Athens and back in the Summer of 1933. The performance of this song inaugurated the The Gesture Guild (2008-10), an occult consultancy preparing visitors for the moment when factory wages equalize in the First and Third Worlds.

The Dark Departments have joined forces in formingthe Gesture Guild, a bureau for the recovery and acquisition of voluntary gestures. The public, afflicted with recession-based involuntary movement due to the loss of solid surfaces and time-space incongruity, can join garment manufacturing programs in search of preparation techniques for wage equalisation.

Music Has No Mercy

( 2007 )

Brain Blood Blooms

Double LP cover for the sludge band, the Melvins. The design was etched into a black aluminium leaf and effected by a pile of amplifiers during the band's performance at Blum and Poe, Los Angeles. The aluminium sheet was crumpled by the force of the sound itself and kicked by the band members during the performance. The result was scanned for an LP cover with the following track names: BRAIN, BLOOD, BLOOMS.

Diaboliad

( 2007 )

Diaboliad, sculpture group.

Music for miners and workers under ground.

Designed to test the limits of the french horn instrument, this score can be performed only by Giovanni Punto, Dennis Brain and Barry Tuckwell in its entirety. Since it requires two resurrections (Brain and Punto) Diaboliad stipulates a Satanic pact. The original score is printed with inkjet ash and each time it is touched, it smears, staining the hands of the reader black.